Universities in the Wild: Places, Publics and Pedagogies (November 5th & 6th)
Western Sydney University, Parramatta City Campus, Sydney Australia.
A joint initiative of the Critical Pedagogies Research Group (WSU), the Faculty of Education & Social Work (University of Auckland), and the Graduate Researcher Academy (Deakin University)
Universities in the wild is a deliberately expansive theme inviting us to think in rhizomatic ways about what’s going on in ‘our’ universities - including taking into account their histories, their geographies, their architectures, their (changing) power relations, their ambitions (aspirations?), their presents and their futures. In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and elsewhere, universities were part of the colonial project to tame the wild(er)ness of lands they were brought to. This project entailed troubling erasures and exclusions that we, in post-colonial societies especially, are still reckoning with. In an even longer history, western universities sought to conserve and hand down precious (orthodox, definitely not wild) knowledge and, later (mostly since the early 19th century) to actively generate original, and even ‘universal’, knowledge through the measured (occasionally wild) practices of science. There are so many things to say and write about in relation to the wildness of our universities - how it disappoints, enchants, and inspires us. About what we hope for our lives in these difficult institutions, for the students that come to them, for the knowledge projects we hold dear, for the societies that host them. This symposium is a place for sharing in that talking and writing and then returning to our own universities enriched and inspired by the generative, hopeful potential that wildness always, somewhere, secretes.
Sub themes
Places - the physical and imaginative places that our universities occupy, their histories, their presents, their futures.
Publics - the communities beyond our universities towards which we have bonds and responsibilities.
Pedagogies - the processes (and their politics) through which knowledge is handed on and exchanged among academics (teachers and students, supervisors and graduate researchers, researchers and researchers) and also their publics.
Places - the physical and imaginative places that our universities occupy, their histories, their presents, their futures.
Publics - the communities beyond our universities towards which we have bonds and responsibilities.
Pedagogies - the processes (and their politics) through which knowledge is handed on and exchanged among academics (teachers and students, supervisors and graduate researchers, researchers and researchers) and also their publics.
Submissions
Format: Framed as a Work in Progress
Length: 300 words related to one or more of the sub themes (title, abstract, 2-3 scholarly refs)
Submission date: Fri 31st July
How: email attachment to CPRG criticalpedagogies@westernsydney.edu.au
Format: Framed as a Work in Progress
Length: 300 words related to one or more of the sub themes (title, abstract, 2-3 scholarly refs)
Submission date: Fri 31st July
How: email attachment to CPRG criticalpedagogies@westernsydney.edu.au
